Organizing RSS Feeds

2009/01/07

I have a lot of blogs I subscribe to. Well over 500 at last count. And the truth of the matter is there is no possible way to read them all. I tried once. It took about 3-4 hours a day. After about 3 days of that, I gave up. So earlier this week I decided to start pruning my blogs and made a Twitter post about it. Jason Hammer (Twitter) responded back and said why don't I check out:

I took a look and it made a lot of sense because I use Google Reader, too. Even in those blogs I don't read as often, there are times when I'm looking for something in particular and those certain blogs are the source to contain it. I certainly don't want to get rid of them and rely on a web search to try and find them again. We tend to like to do topical classification, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for collecting information. For instance, not all SQL Server blogs are created equal. Folks will likely find the blogs of the SQL Server product teams a whole lot more valuable than mine. So I've modified mine to do a classification scheme based similar to what's in that blog post. I'm basically assigning numbers and categories. If it's something I want to read immediately, it's in a category that's a 1. If it's something I'll read usually, it's in a category that's a 2. And if it's something that I'll read when I have the time, it'll get categorized as a 3. So basically, it looks something like this:

1 - Comics

1 - Development

1 - Industry News

1 - OS

1 - Security

1 - SQL Server

2 - Development

2 - Industry News

...

You get the idea. And yes, Comics are #1 because they are short, and they are how I usually start my day. It goes back to the days when I was a kid in Japan and read Stars and Stripes there. The comics were one thing I could always look forward to.